Marketing Music, Big Champagne And The Chumbawamba Factor

Information – really detailed information about who is buying and why  – has always been what has   marketers in almost every category….except music.  The digital age has changed that with Soundscan, MediaBase and others really getting a handle on what is selling and where.

But Big Champagne goes one step further for music marketers by tracking the habits of all of the P2P traffic on the net and actually analyzing the  data in a lot of creative and interesting ways.

A recent article by Chris Dahlen on Pitchforkmedia.com (a great site for alt. music fans) a critical  look at Big Champagne, their theories of where the music business went wrong and how information technologies can provide some answers:

"…Look, we have a theory about why your business is in decline now. We call it the Chumbawamba  Factor.’" If you remember the song "Tubthumbing"– the one that goes, "I get knocked down/ But I get up again"– you may recall that the album, Tubthumping, and actually every other album that the one-time punk band ever recorded, sounded nothing like their big hit. "

"Chumbawamba sold a lot of records, and every single one of them ended up in a milkcrate at a yard sale, six months after it was purchased. And what we told [the record labels] is, ‘Look, you had a great long run of business essentially built on regrettable impulse buys,’" says Garland. "’That was a great business, make no mistake. You owed much of your success to that. But it engendered a lot of cumulative ill-will with the customer.’"

The internet changed that. All of a sudden, legally or not, consumers could test the product themselves. "You used to have to trust the DJ. The DJ played Chumbawamba, then you went out and bought it. Now if the DJ plays Chumbawamba, maybe you go online and stream or download three or four songs, and if it starts to sound like O Brother Where Art Thou?, you buy something. [But] if it starts to sound like Chumbawamba, then maybe you buy a single, or maybe you just download an mp3 and you buy nothing at all…:

Read the entire article here.